“Eddie, you got it comin’. Enjoy every minute, my friend,” said Studs, who knew Eddie’s life hadn’t been easy. They parted, and several months went by before Studs ran into him again. This time Eddie didn’t look so good.
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“How’s that romance?” asked Studs, and Eddie shook his head. “It’s over, Studs,” he said. “I had to let her go.”
And Eddie continued, sadly, “She doesn’t know the songs.”
And if you read and enjoyed Mike Lenehan’s interview with Studs on the process of translating spoken English into written English — it’s on our home page — you might be interested in a column I wrote back in 1994 on his interviewing techniques. Here was his method, far more radical than you might think, for dealing with authors: “First of all, I read the book.”
It was a phrase he used often, and I concluded “that’s part of it” opened a door into his soul I would enter by when the time came. But the time didn’t come. Instead he turned 90, and many more birthdays followed, and on his 95th birthday last year I was happy enough to say what I wanted to say while he lived. Which is simply that Studs understood we live in a world of parts and they are all we know. Strange and various are the parts, while the whole is vast and incomprehensible, and any attempt to reduce it so it slips neatly into our skulls is dangerously absurd.
